Marcyliena Morgan and Asif Agha have provided a wealth of
insights and have raised a number of valuable questions about slang as
a semiotic system for the production of various kinds of identity. I thank
them for their very helpful comments. Here I take up only a few of the
many important issues they address in their remarks on my paper. These
issues concern the definition of slang; the relationship between ideology
and practice; and coolness as a cultural concept.

Morgan
quotes a definition of slang that appears in my paper: “a generation-specific
lexicon associated with taboo topics that is creative and rapidly changing.”
Morgan quite reasonably credits this definition to me, for due to an unfortunate
typographical error (for which I am wholly responsible), my paper terms
this collection of attributes “familiar characteristics of slang” rather than “familiar characterizations of slang.” My own definition of slang is in fact somewhat
different, and while I do not offer an explicit definition in the paper—in
a certain sense, the entire paper is an attempt to work toward such a definition—it
may be useful to propose one here, both to clarify my original intent and
to elaborate on some of the points made by Morgan and Agha.

One
question that arises in defining slang is how it is be classified linguistically.
As Morgan observes, the term slang itself, due to its lay use as a synonym for nonstandarddialect, evokes
a set of language ideologies that run counter to those espoused by linguists.
Where for many linguists slang is a preeminently lexical phenomenon, akin
to jargon or argot (to offer
two other terms in circulation in linguistic discourse), for many nonlinguists
slang also encompasses phonological, morphological, and syntactic phenomena.
Thus in my research I found that European American teenagers classified
as slang not only lexical innovations from African American speakers but
also grammatical structures characteristic of African American Vernacular
English generally. It is therefore perhaps more apt to characterize the
constituents of the slang category as lexicalized rather
than as lexical: for particular
lexemes or phrases to count as slang among members of a culture, they may
mandatorily undergo grammatical rules that otherwise apply at variable
rates of probability, and these processes are not productive but are tied
to specific lexical items.

In addition to these
formal considerations, disparities between linguists and nonlinguists also
arise concerning the social functions of slang: linguists highlight the
ability of slang to construct and display in-group solidarity (which is
treated as synonymous with intra-generational solidarity); nonlinguists
emphasize instead the way that social groups are demarcated and differentiated
from one another through varying levels and kinds of engagement with slang.
Hence ideologies of what slang is are bound up with ideologies of who uses
it and why, a complex process that Agha unpacks both in his comments and
in his own work on honorific registers.

This
raises yet a third complication in the definition of slang. Agha proposes
that slang be understood as a register, where he importantly shifts the
traditional focus away from register as a “situational” variety (which
has been opposed—falsely—to a “social” variety), highlighting it instead
as a locus of culturally shared language ideologies that assign specific
social values to recognizably marked linguistic forms. Agha makes clear
the utility of such a perspective in analyzing slang, which despite its
radical functional difference from honorific registers participates in
similar processes of social signification.

In
my own work, I have found it useful to think about slang in terms of a
related but rather different concept: style. Like register, style rests
on an ideological foundation that associates linguistic forms with social
positionings. But where register is restricted to language, and hence nonlinguistic
dimensions of the phenomenon are necessarily ancillary to the analysis,
style need not be limited to the linguistic realm. To be sure, sociolinguistic
scholarship has traditionally taken a remarkably narrow view of style,
but more recent research understands it more broadly as a collection of
social practices (and ideologies, a point I return to below), to which
language is a crucial but by no means exclusive contributor.

Thus
the concepts of register and style perform complementary kinds of analytic
work: register is especially useful when we are attending to the distinctively
linguistic dimension of social intersubjectivity; style is most helpful
when we are interested in situating linguistic practices within the context
of other semiotic practices, such as physical self-presentation, social
geography, and cultural activities. Yet neither registers nor styles can
operate without the collaboration of ideologies that invest these practices
with social meaning. One response to Agha’s crucial question regarding
the relationship between ideology and practice, then, is that ideology
is a special kind of practice: a praxis of praxis. In other words, where
practice operates at the pragmatic level, ideology operates at the metapragmatic
level, and the two are inseparable components of language use. But the
relationship between pragmatics and metapragmatics is neither predetermined
nor fixed; and it is in the creative negotiation of the two that social
agency comes to the fore.

In
her comments, Morgan discusses a crucial example of this flexible relationship.
She notes that coolness, a central value of European American youth culture,
originates in an African American concept of a cool, in-control social
face that contrasts with “playing the fool.” Through ongoing processes
of cultural appropriation, however, coolness as taken up by European American
youth is associated only secondarily, if at all, with affective self-management
and for these speakers now primarily denotes awareness of and orientation
to current trends of youth culture (often associated with various kinds
of consumption). One way that this latter kind of coolness is signaled
its through the use of slang, including many lexical items borrowed wholesale
from African American youth, for whom these terms are often connected with
the former sense of coolness. In this situation the pragmatics of slang
has not dramatically changed but its metapragmatic or ideological link
to coolness has been radically redefined. While slang signifies coolness
for both African American youth and their European American imitators,
what constitutes coolness is quite different for each group (as well as
for different groups within these racialized categories).

In
light of the foregoing discussion, I offer the following working definition:

Slang is a constantly
negotiated set of lexicalized (and often re-semanticized) terms that are
ideologically associated with the practices and identities of youth culture.

This definition is meant to improve upon the limitations
of earlier characterizations of slang, in which concepts such as “generation”
and “taboo” are usually untheorized. Additionally, it accommodates both
register and style as perspectives on slang. While the definition may not
be of sufficiently broad scope to capture all the phenomena researchers
may want to include under the rubric of slang, it may serve as a useful
guide to the centrality of ideology and practice in the use of lexical
resources for the production of social identities.

In
closing, I want to respond to a brief comment by Morgan in hopes of shedding
additional light on the interrelationship between ideology and practice.
Morgan wonders whether the pseudonym of John Doe, an African American boy
in a multiracial friendship group of hip-hop fans, may “signify some sort
of erasure.” John Doe’s selection of this pseudonym—a metapragmatic act
of identity production that was witnessed not only by me (the one who requested
he perform this act) but also by several of his friends—is perhaps more
complex and multilayered than it may first appear. As I describe in the
paper, and as Morgan reiterates in her comments, for John Doe there is
no unmarked subject position at Bay City High School. Constant processes
of racialization, both locally and more broadly, ensure that African American
students cannot assume their own racial unmarkedness as European American
students are often able to do. Moreover, as a participant in a friendship
group that takes pride in its racial diversity—a characteristic that its
members explicitly contrast with most other groups at the school—John Doe
simultaneously acknowledges and critiques racial positioning through his
friendship patterns and social practices. In his crew’s own racial ideology,
race must be recognized in order to be transcended. Thus the pseudonym John
Doe may perhaps be understood both to parody and to problematize
the possibility of unmarked subjectivity—whether this unmarkedness is the
result of racial privilege or the anonymized subjecthood of social-scientific
research. Clearly, there is a danger of overreading this small text, but
I hope at least to have suggested additional contextual factors that make
it possible to understand John Doe’s name not as an effort to place the
self under erasure but an act of self-construction in which racial ideologies,
social practices, and humor collaborate to challenge scholarly as well
as local ideologies of subjectivity.